monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

When the definitive history of Donald Trump’s presidency comes to be written, many years hence, 11.02am on Sunday 19 August 2018 will surely be granted a special mention.

It was the moment when the phrase was coined that might be said to sum up the spirit of the Trump era: “Truth isn’t truth.”

Truth isn’t truth. The seismic shock of the remark was so forceful it had Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, struggling to contain his giggling.

“Truth isn’t truth? Mr Mayor, do you realize … I mean, this is going to become a bad meme.”

The Mr Mayor to whom he was referring, creator of the bad meme, was Rudy Giuliani, legendary New York mayor on 9/11. Now Trump’s attorney on the Russia investigation, he was trying to justify why the White House has been dragging its feet over granting an interview between the president and special counsel Robert Mueller.

Giuliani said: “When you tell me [Trump] should testify because he’s going to tell the truth so he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth.”

'Truth isn't truth': Giuliani trumps 'alternative facts' with new Orwellian outburst

Maybe to soak up some free time?

You’re Surrounded Mr. Mueller, Give Yourself Up; The Truth is Becoming Too Big To Hide

The once slow headway in the search for the truth has gained momentum. Democratic lawmakers, officials and most of the mainstream media are still in denial and don’t seem to realize yet that too much of the truth has already been revealed for them to go back to their original narrative. The truth has become too big to hide.

A comparison of the carnage at the very highest levels of the FBI and the DOJ to the complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump following over two years of investigations should tell Robert Mueller that it’s time to extricate himself, as gracefully as possible, from this fraud. He needs to admit defeat in his attempt to undo the results of a fair election.

Truth isn’t truth.

The modern Republican party has gone full Derrida. But way stupider.

As Trump Dismantles Clean Air Rules, an Industry Lawyer Delivers for Ex-Clients
By ERIC LIPTON 1 hr ago

Trump staffer fired over appearance with white…

Ariz. GOP Senate candidate defends bus tour with…



a man with smoke coming out of it: The Valero St. Charles Oil Refiner in Norco, La. Just before Mr. Wehrum arrived at the E.P.A., the agency’s clean air office was sent a lengthy petrochemical industry memo with his name on it as counsel to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers association, whose includes senior corporate officers from Valero Energy, Marathon Petroleum and Chevron.
Next Slide
Full screen

1/3 SLIDES © Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The Valero St. Charles Oil Refiner in Norco, La. Just before Mr. Wehrum arrived at the E.P.A., the agency’s clean air office was sent a lengthy petrochemical industry memo with his name on it as counsel to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers association, whose includes senior corporate officers from Valero Energy, Marathon Petroleum and Chevron.

WASHINGTON — As a corporate lawyer, William L. Wehrum worked for the better part of a decade to weaken air pollution rules by fighting the Environmental Protection Agency in court on behalf of chemical manufacturers, refineries, oil drillers and coal-burning power plants.
Now, Mr. Wehrum is about to deliver one of the biggest victories yet for his industry clients — this time from inside the Trump administration as the government’s top air pollution official.
On Tuesday, President Trump is expected to propose a vast rollback of regulations on emissions from coal plants, including many owned by members of a coal-burning trade association that had retained Mr. Wehrum and his firm as recently as last year to push for the changes.
Sign Up For the Morning Briefing Newsletter

The proposal strikes at the heart of climate-change regulations adopted by the Obama administration to force change among polluting industries, and follows the relaxation of separate rules governing when power plants must upgrade air pollution equipment. Mr. Wehrum, who has led the E.P.A.’s clean air office since November, also helped deliver the changes in several of those rules.
The rollbacks are part of the administration’s effort to bring regulatory relief to the coal industry, and other major sources of air pollution. But to proponents of a tougher stance on industries that contribute to global warming, Mr. Wehrum is regarded as the single biggest threat inside the E.P.A., with Tuesday’s expected announcement to weaken what is known as the Clean Power Plan the most recent evidence of his handiwork.
“They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, ‘Here are the keys to the henhouse,’” said Bruce Buckheit, an air pollution expert who worked for the Justice Department’s Environmental Enforcement Section and as director of the E.P.A.’s air enforcement office under Democratic and Republican presidents.
Mr. Wehrum has been able to push his deregulatory agenda without running into ethics troubles because of a quirk in federal ethics rules. The rules limit the activities of officials who join the government from industry — but they are less restrictive for lawyers than for officials who had worked as registered lobbyists.
The end result is that the ethics rules generally allow Mr. Wehrum to help oversee the drafting of policies that broadly benefit the industries or clients he represented in recent years.
“It is a failing in the rule,” said Norman Eisen, a former Obama administration lawyer who wrote the White House ethics code that creates the division between how ex-lawyers and ex-lobbyists are treated. “One is subject to the tougher lobb

There are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore.

Or the president knows that he got nothing. In that case, when he bragged on his way home that “this should have been done years ago” and later tweeted “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he was simply being fraudulent in the way that works so well for him at home. Stripped of its made-for-TV trappings—the walk, the flags, the solemn handshake, and the breathless talk of history being made—nothing was actually agreed to at the summit. Evidence that there had, in fact, been no meeting of the minds came with whiplash speed. In just over three weeks North Korea was accusing the US, which had not changed its position, of “gangster-like” demands. Call it Fake Diplomacy.

Which is more dangerous—someone so convinced of his abilities and so lazy that he would walk into such a negotiation without knowing even the tiny bit of history (sketched in the box at the bottom of this page), or someone willing to offer the world a bald-faced lie? Someone who doesn’t try, or someone who doesn’t care about the actual outcome as long as he can sell a short-lived story of personal success and move on?

(...)

More accurately, because of rash concessions made by Trump at the meeting, Pompeo started in a hole, facing emboldened adversaries, and with shaken allies at his back. Failing to make meaningful progress with North Korea is no shame, and there is no question that talking is an improvement over escalating threats of war. But without getting anything from North Korea, Trump gave and gave. Whether from impulsiveness or ignorance, he produced real losses for American security and that of South Korea and Japan.

Meeting with a sitting US president was a goal Pyongyang had sought for decades. Trump gave it for free. Rather than remaining silent on North Korea’s human rights record in the interest of reaching an agreement, Trump needlessly chose to make light of it, terming North Korea “rough” and adding, “It’s rough in a lot of places.” For good measure, he wrapped Kim in just about every warm adjective he could find: nice, funny, really smart, worthy, one in 10,000, very talented, loves his people, and so on. (If Trump believes that Kim is as susceptible to flattery as he is himself, he will likely soon discover his error.)

(...)

Kim must have been stunned by the rain of unreciprocated gifts. In Beijing, Xi Jinping too got more than he could have hoped for: withdrawal of American pressure that threatened to destabilize North Korea; removal of the pressure on him to crack down on Pyongyang; and further evidence, in Trump’s desire to remove US troops from Korea, of a waning American commitment to leadership in Asia, which had already been indicated by Washington’s withdrawal last year from its pan-Asian trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Tokyo’s dismay and Seoul’s shocked reaction to news of the unilateral US decision to suspend military exercises are evidence that Xi can easily interpret as yet another fissure in the once-solid bulwark of US alliances in the Pacific. As Xi spends hundreds of billions to woo allies around Asia, most of them poor, he can only be shaking his head in amazement at the spectacle of the American president complaining that his allies—after China, by far the two strongest states in the region—cost him too much.

(...)

In retrospect, it was too optimistic to hope that Trump’s first experience of the difficulties of constructing an international agreement would lead him and his team to take a second look at what they are throwing away in the Iran deal, which dwarfs what has ever been agreed to with North Korea. He is simply too practiced at skimming the surface of complex issues and convincing himself of whatever he wants to believe. Perhaps the best hope for this summit’s eventual outcome is that, like its many predecessors, it will gradually dissolve in deadlocked negotiations. Then it will be time to start again: this time with preparation and realistic expectations. Meanwhile, it stands as a sobering reminder to the world that the current American president is capable of treating even war-and-peace diplomacy as performance art in the interest of personal, rather than national, benefit.